Don’t you think Rumsfeld calculated precisely the exact number of troops..

[Zinfandel]

necessary to keep a war going in Iraq?

Exactly the amount to keep the war going, while getting 17 US bases built in and around the oil fields of Iraq, a billion dollar US embassy/fortress in Baghdad, etc... Rumsfeld ordered just enough troops so as not to over take Iraq, but enough to let Americans know the insurgents (or terrorist as they are fondly described) are a dastardly threat to Americans and good thing we are over there and stopping them there. And Bush gets to be a 'war time" president to boot, passing fascist corporate agenda in the name of terror and fear. Don’t you feel safer?

Obviously they don't care one shit about the troops and how many die, they don't care if the troops have adequate armour or if they are even being fed properly. Soldiers are just the means to keep the war going...Fuck the soldiers, it's been this way all through human history, the poor fighting for the rich to steal resources from other countries.

But in order to have a war, the other side needs weapons…

Why do you suppose mountains of weapons & explosives were left alone, unguarded, and that U.S. troops were told to ignore them? Do you think Rummy knows precisely how to keep a war going?

Rummy, Bush & the boys absolutely knew, positively, long before the American people actually found out for sure, that Iraq had absolutely no weapons whats so ever, (they knew there was NO WMD but they wanted that oil and sold Americans the WMD bullshit)...Now they have that oil!

After all, with everyone paying attention to the war, who’s counting the millions of barrels of oil leaving Iraq…Oh that’s right those same dastardly terrorist are blowing up the pipelines and no oil is getting to the gas pumps…

Yeah, right...

As oil companies continue to record incredible record profits quarter after quarter -- AND -- They get to gouge us at the pumps all at the same time!

Damn terrorist!

[applegrove]

1. No. He was incompetent. They did not plan for winning the peace.

Rummy bullied and pressured the generals to undo the plan to invade with 550,000 troops and whittled in down, again & again, till he got the number her wanted. What was it? 200,000?

Then remember it was the Turks fault for not allowing the USA to go in through Turkey and thus have hand to hand compete with Sunnis and kill many of them. Which Rumsfield announced when he began to be criticized. Which must have impressed the Sunnis at the time... "we didn't kill the majority of Sunnis because we couldn't go in through the north where the Sunnis were".

This was their shining example. This was supposed to be a war not based on humanitarian issues, but one based on pre-emptively stopping aggression on the part of some country who could in the future be a threat. All they wanted was to set the precedent. They failed. Rummy is incompetent.

That is it that is all.

[etherealtruth]

11. Agreed

The Iraq debacle has been a long series of miscalculations and faulty projections.

INCOMPETENCE is the only way to describe it.

[applegrove]

14. Faulty "assumptions". Rummy kept talking about the new "assumptions"

the generals needed to follow. Neocon ones. You know ..based on myth!

I see the FDA has had to resort to the old way of approving drugs too. It seems the market with its magic hand somehow was not good at approving drugs. Imagine that?

[scarletwoman]

2. You make some very good points.

Perpetual war and sowing chaos are prime objectives of the PNAC crowd.

Yes, I can very well believe that much of what appears to be "incompetence" is actually quite deliberate.

sw

[Zinfandel]

4. Well, Cheney told us (and to accept) The U.S. being in "never ending war"!

They have no need for a draft...They can always hire more 'contractors' or illegal aliens to fight 9with our tax dollars)...As long as there is "never ending war" the republicans & the corporations are happy!

War is GREAT for business...Just ask Halliburton or Carlyle Group, or Bechtel, or General Electric, or...

[The Magistrate]

12. That Does Not Seem Likely To Me, Ma'am

But then, you know my motto: "Never attribute to malice what stupidity will suffice to explain."

It seems most likely to me these people actually believed their propagandas about being welcomed as liberators. They know nothing of the world, really, and are resolutely and proudly ignorant of the different cultures and mores of the region they have so blithely entered. Even now, they think they can quell the resistance to their presence, and restore what they imagine to be a "normal" state of coloial quiesence there. But the fact is they have no idea how to do so short of frightfulness, and they do not really have the stomach, either, for the degree of frightfulness that would be required for success along that line.

[scarletwoman]

15. "stupidity will suffice..."

You may very well be correct, yet I cannot help but see at least as much malice in evidence as stupidity.

Is not subjecting a foreign nation that has not committed an offensive act to "shock and awe" a fundamentally malicious act? Is not promoting the invasion of a foreign nation on the basis of patently false assertions -- i.e. connecting Iraq with 9/11 -- an act of malice aforethought?

These dreamers of a "New American Century" may very well be stupid, but the immorality of the means they have chosen in pursuit of their end, is evidence enough for me of their essential malice.

They are imperialists who hold the destruction of human life -- whether Iraqi or U.S. soldier -- of negligable consequence in the grand scheme of their quest for power.

"War is the health of the state" (Randolph Bourne) -- Why should we doubt that these neo-imperialists have every intention of fomenting perpetual war in order to achieve their aims?

sw

[jedr]

3. I would feel better if I thought that they were actually competent:

The only motivator that these people have is greed....if there is money in it for them, they tend to do a very good job. Everything else seems to be a folly.

[LaPera]

5. Just keep the people in fear, believing there is a threat.

That's all it takes to steal whatever they want. And they want it ALL!

[cliss]

6. In order to understand Rummy,

you have to go into his past. Let's take a look. He's been around for a long time. He worked for Gerald Ford, and was involved in the VietNam war.

What about his accomplishments, was he a genius? No, he wasn't. He's made a ton of mistakes. Our country survived all his mistakes, but we didn't manage to get rid of him. He's really nothing more than an incompetent old man with an ego the size of Texas.

He left the government to be the CEO of Seale Pharmaceuticals. Again, he didn't get the job based on his merits, but by the crony deals he got for this company, by getting them lucrative government contracts worth $$$. I understand he fired a bunch of people who didn't agree with him.

This is a trait he has continued. Once he milked that company dry (RumsFool is now worth $136 million), he went back to the government like the tapeworm he is. He gutted the Pentagon and fired anybody who didn't agree with him 100%.

So any generals you see today, are nothing more than the "toadies who survived" RumsFailed's Inquisition. Like that weasel Gen. Myers.

[Zinfandel]

7. I mostly used Rumsfeld as a symbol of the whole corporate republican

imperialism, that sick mentality, out to steal everything because can and they have the U.S. military might to do so...and why, and how these same group of fascist pig motherfuckers who want to prolong death and destruction for their own profit...This is a sickness, however, they view it as opportunity.

And again, Rumsfeld was just one of the fascist face I used...It could of been Cheney, Rove, a CEO of any complicit corporation getting in on the stealing and profits all done with such glee. The lies and the invaision were planned and they saw it as a way to steal and grab...and they knew lying killing and people dying was to be part of it and that didn't bother them in the slightest...While disgustingly defending and rationalizing their greed with false patriotism and the use of bullshit terrorist threats as justification for their sick, sick greed.

[cliss]

8. And you picked a good one.

RumsFailed is the worst, in my opinion. In a carton of rotten eggs, this one is the most rotten.

I even called the White House, last summer. I ranted and raved for about 10 minutes, about RumsFool. Poor receptionist. I didn't care. I was almost homicidal after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and I was going to stir the pot.

He's a cancer on humanity.

[tabasco]

10. You got that right. The yes-men are being promoted.

The leaders wih moral courage to disagree are being retired. This will be the long-lasting damage to the military after these criminals are defeated. Same as the Supreme Court. These assholes have fkkked the country up for a long time.

Myers was appointed because he is a Star Wars man. That was the neocon plan to bilk the taxpayers before 9-11 happened. So we ended up with a clueless USAF geek in charge with two ground wars. These people look incompetent but they are truly successful in making the rich richer and the res of us serfs.

[Junkdrawer]

9. Yep. "Poor post war planning" is the cover....

Just as "Poor pre-war intelligence"...

Just as "Pre-9/11 civil rights concerns"...

Oh, and I think the most dangerous moment was when they thought the Sunnis and the Shiites were uniting against us. Then, suddenly "Sunnis" started bombing Shia mosques. Yeah, right.

[wli]

13. Rummy probably didn't calculate much more than Halliburton's kickbacks